{"id":22302,"date":"2018-07-30T16:44:56","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T20:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=22302"},"modified":"2018-07-30T16:44:56","modified_gmt":"2018-07-30T20:44:56","slug":"twitter-and-shadow-banning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/30\/twitter-and-shadow-banning\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter and Shadow Banning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vijaya Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour<\/a> (tweet<\/a>, Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.\n<\/p>

We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.<\/p>\n

We do rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it’s immediately relevant. These ranking models take many signals into consideration to best organize tweets for timely relevance. We must also address bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation<\/a>.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

We know this approach is working because we see fewer abuse reports and spam reports.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They seem to be saying that Twitter may decide not to show certain tweets in your timeline or searches for various algorithmic reasons. (Low-ranked tweets don’t just show up at the bottom; they don’t show up at all.) They don’t consider this shadow banning because you can still see the tweets if you go to that person’s profile (which is impractical).<\/p>\n

This doesn’t make much sense to me because it apparently also applies to tweets from users that you’ve specifically chosen to follow. And the person tweeting sees all their own tweets in their timeline, so they don’t know they’re invisible to others. That’s kind of what’s meant by “shadow.”<\/p>\n

This is apparently separate from the quality<\/a> filter<\/a>, which affects tweets from people you don’t follow. You can turn this off, and I’ve seen links on twitter.com where I can click to show which tweets were hidden.<\/p>\n

I guess I have no way of knowing whether any tweets have been hidden from me by Twitter’s ranking algorithm. As far as I know, no one I follow has complained about being censored. But I would prefer to just always see everything. If someone I follow is posting bad stuff, I want to know that, and then I can just choose to unfollow them.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vijaya Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour (tweet, Hacker News): The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster. We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-07-30T20:44:58Z","apple_news_api_id":"361edce4-a686-4be6-a4e7-0ce3445babe1","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2018-07-30T20:45:00Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ANh7c5KaGS-ak5wzjRFur4Q","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[49,96],"class_list":["post-22302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-twitter","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22303,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22302\/revisions\/22303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}